Provenance
Laing Galleries, Toronto
H.R. Milner, Edmonton
Walter Klinkhoff Gallery, Montreal
Acquired by the present Private Collection, November 2002
Exhibited
“The H.R. Milner Collection”, Art Gallery of Edmonton, 1976, no. 64
“Horatio Walker (1858-1938)”, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, 17 December-28 January 1978, no. 39
Literature
“The H.R. Milner Collection,” Art Gallery of Edmonton, 1976, no. 64, reproduced
“Horatio Walker (1858-1938)”, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, 1977, no. 39, listed page 49
Lyne Gravel, “Les Oeuvres d’Horatio Walker”, Musée du Québec, 1987, no. 106800
Horatio Walker achieved phenomenal success in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s by working in the style of the “American Barbizon” movement. American Barbizon artists— including figures such as George Innes, Joseph Foxcroft Cole and Marie a’Becket—produced scenes of rural life and landscapes in the vein popularized in the preceding decades by French artists such as Jean-François Millet, Charles-François Daubigny and Théodore Rousseau, who had worked in and around the village of Barbizon and the neighbouring Forest of Fontainebleau.
American Barbizon painting struck exactly the right note during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, appealing as it did to the mood of agrarian nostalgia that arose in reaction against the wave of industrialization that washed over the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War. Walker’s association with the movement was so close (he had a New York studio and exhibited extensively in the USA) that he was widely considered to be an American himself. He was avidly collected by museums and private buyers south of the border, and in the years around the turn of the century won a series of prizes at such international exhibitions as the 1893 Chicago Columbia Exposition, the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, the 1901 Buffalo Pan-American Exposition, and the 1904 St Louis Purchase Exhibition. He had such strong private and institutional patronage networks in the United States that his work was largely priced out of the Canadian market, and it was only in 1911 that the National Gallery purchased his “Oxen Drinking”, for the then astronomical sum of $10,000.
“The Woodcutter”, painted near the end of Walker’s most inventive and productive decades, is an example of how he reimagined, in a North American context, Jean-François Millet’s images of the French rural poor. Although the woodcutter is depicted as taking a temporary rest from his work (Walker more commonly followed Millet’s example of showing his figures actively toiling), he is centrally placed on the canvas, and occupies almost its full height and width, thereby echoing Millet’s fondness for endowing his subjects with a physical grandeur that emphasized his veneration of their humble lives. The identity of Walker’s sitter is unknown, but his toque is identical to the one shown in a much earlier (1894) watercolour portrait of an exhausted, more aged woodcutter, Célestin Rousseau, seated—like the labourer in “The Woodcutter”—amidst piles of logs and with his axe leaning against his leg (”Le père Célestin”, Musée nationale des beaux-arts du Québec). Like the man portrayed in “The Woodcutter”, Célestin Rousseau fills almost the entire image, emphasizing Walker’s admiration for local population whose lives were dominated by physical labour but who retained for him their interest as distinctive individuals.
“The Woodcutter” is set outdoors, but it would have been painted in Walker’s studio (either in Ste-Pétronille or New York) as was his practice, based on drawings made “en plein air” or using a local man as an in-studio model. The rich, flowing paint application, which draws attention to itself against the relatively flat background sky and trees, was a key factor in Walker’s appeal, occurring not only in his more romantic, emotional and larger-scale canvases but also here, in this comparatively modest—in both size and subject matter—image. As in all of his work, Walker conveys in “The Woodcutter” his intense sympathy for the lives of his French-Canadian neighbours and friends on Île d’Orléans.
We extend our thanks to Brian Foss, Carleton University Chancellor’s Professor of Art & Architectural History, and co‒curator of “1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group” for his assistance in researching this artwork and for contributing the preceding essay.
